Category Archives: Employee Engagement

The past was so simple. Life was so simple and good. Those were the good old days. How often have you heard these ruminations? It is fairly common! Surprisingly, as we forge a path into the future, these ruminations gather pace. We become nostalgic and we thus rake fear of the future. We attribute a good life to a simple life. But the simple life is measured against the past. In fact, our modus operandi is to chunk up the past into timeboxes and then surface all the positive elements. While that is an endeavor that might give us some respite from what is happening today, the fact is that the nostalgia is largely grounded in fiction. It would be foolish to recall the best elements and compare it to what we see emerging today which conflates good and bad. We are wired for survival: If we have survived into the present, it makes for a good argument perhaps that the conditions that led to our survival today can only be due to a constellation of good factors that far outweighed the bad. But when we look into the future rife with uncertainty, we create this rather dystopian world – a world of gloom and doom and then we wonder: why are we so stressed? Soon we engage in a vicious cycle of thought and our actions are governed by the thought. You have heard – Hope for the best and plan for the worst. Really? I would imagine that when one hopes for the best and the facts do not undermine the trend, would it not be better to hope for the best and plan for the best. It is true that things might not work out as planned but ought we to always build out models and frameworks to counter that possibility. We say that the world is complex and that the complexity forces us to establish certain heuristics to navigate the plenar forces of complexity. So let us understand what complexity is. What does it mean? And with our new understanding of complexity through the course of this chapter, would we perhaps arrive at a different mindset that speaks of optimism and innovation. We will certainly not settle that matter at the end of this chapter, but we hope that we will surface enough questions, so you can reflect upon where we are and where we are going in a more judicious manner – a manner grounded on facts and values. Let us now begin our journey!

The sky is blue. We hear this statement. It is a simple statement. There is a noun, a verb and an adjective. In the English-speaking world, we can only agree on what constitutes the “sky”. We might have a hard time defining it – Merriam Webster defines the sky as the upper atmosphere or expanse of space that constitutes an apparent great vault or arch over the earth. A five-year-old would point to the sky to define sky. Now how do we define blue. A primary color between green and violet. Is that how you think about blue or do you just arrive at an understanding of what that color means. Once again, a five-year-old would identify blue: she would not look at green and violet as constituent colors. The statement – The sky is blue – for the sake of argument is fairly simple!

However, if we say that the sky is a shade of blue, we introduce an element of ambiguity, don’t we? Is it dark blue, light blue, sky blue (so we get into recursive thinking), or some other property that is bluish but not quite blue. What has emerged thus is an element of complexity – a new variable that might be considered a slider on a scale. How we slide our understanding is determined by our experience, our perception or even our wishful thinking. The point being that complexity ceases to be purely an objective property. Rather it is an emergent property driven by our interpretation. Protagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher, says that the man is a measure of all things. What he is saying is that our lens of evaluation is purely predicated on our experiences in life. There is nothing that exists outside the boundaries of our experience. Now Socrates arrived at a different view – namely, he proved that certain elements are ordered in a manner that exists outside the boundaries of our experience. We will get back to this in later chapters. The point being that complexity is an emergent phenomenon that occurs due to our interpretation. Natural scientists will argue, like Socrates, that there are complex systems that exist despite our interpretations. And that is true as well. So how do we balance these opposing views at the same time: is that a sign of insanity? Well, that is a very complex question (excuse my pun) and so we need to further expand on the term Complexity.

In order to define complexity, let us now break this up a bit further. Complex systems have multiple variables: these variables interact with each other; these variables might be subject to interpretation in the human condition; if not, these variables interact in a manner to enable emergent properties which might have a life of its own. These complex systems might be decentralized and have information processing pathways outside the lens of science and human perception. The complex systems are malleable and adaptive.

Markets are complex institution. When we try to centralize the market, then we take a position that we feel we understand the complexity and thus can determine the outcomes in a certain way. Socialist governments have long tried to manage markets but have not been successful. Nobel winner, Frederich Hayek, has long argued that the markets are a result of spontaneous order and not design. It has multiple variables, significant information processing is underway at any given time in an active market, and the market adapts to the information processing mechanism. But there are winners and losers in a market as well. Why? Because each of them observes the market dynamics and arrive at different conclusions. Complexity does not follow a deterministic path. Neither does the market and we have lot of success and failures that suggest that to be the case.

Let us look at another example. Examples will probably give us an appreciation for the concept and this will be very important as we sped through the journey into the future.

Insect behavior is a case in point. Whether we look at bees or ants, it is a common fact that these insects have extremely complex systems despite the lack of sufficient instruments for survival for one bee or one ant. In 1705, Bernard Mandeville wrote a book called: Fable of the Bees. It was a poem. Here is a part of the poem. What Mandeville is clearly hinting at is the fact that there would be an innate failure to centralize complex systems like a bee hive. Rather, the complex systems emerge in a way to create innate systems that stabilize for success and survival in the long run.

A Spacious Hive well stock’d with Bees,

That lived in Luxury and Ease;

And yet as fam’d for Laws and Arms,

As yielding large and early Swarms;

Was counted the great Nursery

Of Sciences and Industry.

No Bees had better Government,

More Fickleness, or less Content.

They were not Slaves to Tyranny,

Nor ruled by wild Democracy;

But Kings, that could not wrong, because

Their Power was circumscrib’d by Laws.

Then we have the ant colonies. An ant is blind. Yet a colony has collective intelligence. The ants work together, despite individual shortcomings that challenge an individual survival, to figure out how to exist and propagate as group. How does a simple living organism that is subject to the whims and fancies of nature survive and seed every corner of the earth in great volumes? Entomologists and social scientists and biologists have tried to figure this out and have posited a lot of theories. The point is that complex systems are not bounded by our reason alone. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Key Takeaway

A complex system is the result of the interaction of a network of variables that gives rise to collective behavior, information processing and self-learning and adaptive system that does not completely lie in the purview of human explanation.

It has been a while since I posted on this blog. It just so happens that life is what happens to you when you have other plans. Having said that, I decided early this year to ready 42 books this year across a wide range of genres. I have been trying to keep pace, and have succeeded so far.

Here are the books that I have read and plan to read:

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison ( Read)

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker ( Read)

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan ( Read)

Nutshell: A Novel by Ian McEwan ( Read)

Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson ( Read)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Plot Against America by Phil Roth

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Harari

The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow

American Political Rhetoric: Essential Speeches and Writings by Peter Augustine Lawler and Robert Schaefer

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz

Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

What is Mathematics: An Elementary Approach to Idea and Methods by Robbins & Stewart

Algorithms to live by: Computer Science of Human Decisions by Christian & Griffiths

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohammed El-Arian

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

Where Good Ideas come from by Steven Johnson

Original: How Non-Conformists move the world by Adam Grant

Start with Why by Simon Sinek

The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk

Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation by John Ferling

The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson

Between the World and Me: Ta Nehisi-Coates

Active Liberty: Interpreting our Democratic Constitution

The Blue Guitar by John Banville

The Euro Crisis and its Aftermath by Jean Pisani-Fery

Africa: Why Economists get it wrong by Morten Jerven

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Financial awareness of key drivers are becoming the paramount leading indicators for organizational success. For most, the finance department is a corner office service that offers ad hoc analysis on strategic and operational initiatives to a company, and provides an ex-post assessment of the financial condition of the company among a select few. There are some key financial metrics that one wants to measure across all companies and all industries without exception, but then there are unique metrics that reflect the key underlying drivers for organizational success. Organizations align their forays into new markets, new strategies and new ventures around a narrative that culminates in a financial metric or a proxy that illustrates opportunities lost or gained.

Having been cast in operational finance roles for a good length of my career, I have often encountered a high level of interest to learn financial concepts in areas such as engineering, product management, operations, sales, etc. I have to admit that I have been humbled by the fairly wide common-sense understanding of basic financial concepts that these folks have. However, in most cases, the understanding is less than skin deep with misunderstandings that are meaningful. The good news is that I have also noticed a promising trend, namely … the questions are more thoroughly weighed by the “non-finance” participants, and there seems to be an elevated understanding of key financial drivers that translate to commercial success. This knowledge continues to accelerate … largely, because of convergence of areas around data science, analytics, assessment of personal ownership stakes, etc. But the passing of such information across these channels to the hungry recipients are not formalized. In other words, I posit that having a formal channel of inculcating financial education across the various functional areas would pay rich dividends for the company in the long run. Finance is a vast enough field that partaking general knowledge in these concepts which are more than merely skin-deep would also enable the finance group to engage in meaningful conversations with other functional experts, thus allowing the narrative around the numbers to be more wholesome. Thus, imparting the financial knowledge would be beneficial to the finance department as well.

To be effective in creating a formal channel of disseminating information of the key areas in finance that matter to the organization, it is important to understand the operational drivers. When I say operational drivers, I am expanding that to encompass drivers that may uniquely affect other functional areas. For example, sales may be concerned with revenue, margins whereas production may be concerned with server capacity, work-in-process and throughput, etc. At the end, the financial metrics are derivatives. They are cross products of single or multiple drivers and these are the elements that need to be fleshed out to effect a spirited conversation. That would then enable the production of a financial barometer that everyone in the organization can rally behind and understand, and more importantly … be able to assess how their individual contribution has and will advance organization goals.

All products go through a life-cycle. However, the genius of an organization lies in how to manage the life-cycle of the product and extend it as necessary to serve the customers. Thus, it is not merely the wizardry in technology and manufacturing that determine the ultimate longevity of the product in the market and the mind share of the customer. The product has to respond to the diversity of demands determined by disposable income, demographics, geography, etc. In business school speak, we say that this is part of market segmentation coupled with the appropriate marketing message. However, there is not an explicit strategy formulated around identifying

Corporate Culture

Extended Culture

To achieve success, firms increasingly must develop products by leveraging ad coordinating broad creative capabilities and resources, which often are diffused across geographical and cultural boundaries. But what we have to explore is a lot more than that from the incipient stages that a product has imagined: How do we instill unique corporate DNA into the product that immediately marks the product with a corporate signature? In addition, how do we built out a product that is tenable across the farthest reaches of geography and cultural diversity?

Thus, an innovative approach is called for in product development … particularly, in a global context. The approach entails getting cross-disciplinary teams in liberal arts, science, business, etc. to work together to gather deeper insights into the cultural strains that drive decisions in various markets. To reiterate, there is no one particular function that is paramount: all of them have to work and improvise together while ensuring that there are channels that gather feedback. The cross disciplinary team and the institutionalization of a feedback mechanism that can be quickly acted upon are the key parameters to ensure that the right product is in the market and that it will be extended accordingly to the chatter of the crowds.

Having said that, this is hardly news! A lot of companies are well on their way to instill these factors into product design and development. Companies have created organizational architectures in the corporate structure in a manner that culturally appropriate products are developed and maintained in dispersed local markets. However, in most instances, we have also seen that the way they view this is to have local managers run the show, with the presumption that these “culturally appropriate” products will make good in those markets. But along the way, the piece that dissembles over time on account of creating the local flavor is that the product may not mirror the culture that the corporate group wants to instill. If these two are not aptly managed and balanced, islands of conflict will be created. Thus, my contention is that a top-down value mandate ought to set the appropriate parameters inside which the hotbed of collaborative activity would take place for product design and development in various markets.

Thus the necessary top down value systems that would bring culture into products would be:

Open areas for employees to express their thoughts and ideas

Diversity of people with different skill sets in product teams will contribute to product development

Encouraging internal and external speakers to expound upon the product touch points in the community.

Empowerment and recognition systems.

Proper formulation of monetary incentives to inspire and maintain focus.

I have some opinions on this matter. I started a company last year that allows people within and outside of the company to recommend professionals based on projects. We have been ushered into a world where our jobs, for the most part, constitute a series of projects that are undertaken over the course of a person’s career. The recognition system around this granular element is lacking; we have recommendations and recognition systems that have been popularized by LinkedIn, Kudos, Rypple, etc. But we have not seen much development in tools that address recognition around projects in the public domain. I foresee the possibility of LinkedIn getting into this space soon. Why? It is simple. The answer is in their “useless” Endorsement feature that has been on since late last year. As of March 13, one billion endorsements have been given to 56 million LinkedIn members, an average of about 4 per person. What does this mean? It means that LinkedIn has just validated a potential feature which will add more flavor to the endorsements – Why have you granted these endorsements in the first place?

Thus, it stands to reason the natural step is to reach out to these endorsers by providing them appropriate templates to add more flavor to the endorsements. Doing so will force a small community of the 56 million participants to add some flavor. Even if that constitutes 10%, that is almost 5.6M members who are contributing to this feature. Now how many products do you know that release one feature and very quickly gather close to six million active participants to use it? In addition, this would only gain force since more and more people would use this feature and all of a sudden … the endorsements become a beachhead into a very strategic product.

The other area that LinkedIn will probably step into is to catch the users young. Today it happens to be professionals; I will not be surprised if they start moving into the university/college space and what is a more effective way to bridge than to position a product that recognizes individuals against projects the individuals have collaborated on.

LinkedIn and Facebook are two of the great companies of our time and they are peopled with incredibly smart people. So what may seemingly appear as a great failure in fact will become the enabler of a successful product that will significantly increase the revenue streams of LinkedIn in the long run!

Facebook began with a simple thesis: Connect Friends. That was the sine qua non of its existence. From a simple thesis to an effective UI design, Facebook has grown over the years to become the third largest community in the world. But as of the last few years they have had to resort to generating revenue to meet shareholder expectations. Today it is noon at Facebook but there is the long shadow of darkness that I posit have fallen upon perhaps one of the most influential companies in history.

The fact is that leaping from connecting friends to managing the conversations allows Facebook to create this petri dish to understand social interactions at large scale eased by their fine technology platform. To that end, they are moving into alternative distribution channels to create broader reach into global audience and to gather deeper insights into the interaction templates of the participants. The possibilities are immense: in that, this platform can be a collaborative beachhead into discoveries, exploration, learning, education, social and environmental awareness and ultimately contribute to elevated human conscience. But it has faltered, perhaps the shareholders and the analysts are much to blame, on account of the fangled existence of market demands and it has become one global billboard for advertisers to promote their brands. Darkness at noon is the most appropriate metaphor to reflect Facebook as it is now.

Let us take a small turn to briefly look at some of other very influential companies that have not been as much derailed as has Facebook. The companies are Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. Each of them are the leaders in their category, and all of them have moved toward monetization schemes from their specific user base. Each of them has weighed in significantly in their respective categories to create movements that have or will affect the course of the future. We all know how Twitter has contributed to super-fast news feeds globally that have spontaneously generated mass coalescence around issues that make a difference; Google has been an effective tool to allow an average person to access information; and LinkedIn has created professional and collaborative environment in the professional space. Thus, all three of these companies, despite supplementing fully their appetite for revenue through advertising, have not compromised their quintessence for being. Now all of these companies can definitely move their artillery to encompass the trajectory of FB but that would be a steep hill to climb. Furthermore, these companies have an aura associated within their categories: attempts to move out of their category have been feeble at best, and in some instances, not successful. Facebook has a phenomenal chance of putting together what they have to create a communion of knowledge and wisdom. And no company exists in the market better suited to do that at this point.

One could counter that Facebook sticks to its original vision and that what we have today is indeed what Facebook had planned for all along since the beginning. I don’t disagree. My point of contention in this matter is that though is that Facebook has created this informal and awesome platform for conversations and communities among friends, it has glossed over the immense positive fallout that could occur as a result of these interactions. And that is the development and enhancement of knowledge, collaboration, cultural play, encourage a diversity of thought, philanthropy, crowd sourcing scientific and artistic breakthroughs, etc. In other words, the objective has been met for the most part. Thank you Mark! Now Facebook needs to usher in a renaissance in the courtyard. Facebook needs to find a way out of the advertising morass that has shed darkness over all the product extensions and launches that have taken place over the last 2 years: Facebook can force a point of inflection to quadruple its impact on the course of history and knowledge. And the revenue will follow!

Consider this. Your professional career is a series of projects. Employers look for accountability and performance, and they measure you by how you fare on your projects. Everything else, for the most part, is white noise. The projects you work on establish your skill set and before long – your career trajectory. However, all the great stuff that you have done at work is for the most part hidden from other people in your company or your professional colleagues. You may get a recommendation on LinkedIn, which is fairly high-level, or you may receive endorsements for your skills, which is awesome. But the Endorsements on LinkedIn seem a little random, don’t they? Wouldn’t it be just awesome to recognize, or be recognized by, your colleagues for projects that you have worked on. We are sure that there are projects that you have worked on that involves third-party vendors, consultants, service providers, clients, etc. – well, now you have a forum to send and receive recognition, in a beautiful form factor, that you can choose to display across your networks.

Imagine an employee review. You must have spent some time thinking through all the great stuff that you have done that you want to attach to your review form. And you may have, in your haste, forgotten some of the great stuff that you have done and been recognized for informally. So how cool would it be to print or email all the projects that you’ve worked on and the recognition you’ve received to your manager? How cool would it be to send all the people that you have recognized for their phenomenal work? For in the act of participating in the recognition ecosystem that our application provides you – you are an engaged and prized employee that any company would want to retain, nurture and develop.

Now imagine you are looking for a job. You have a resume. That is nice. And then the potential employer or recruiter is redirected to your professional networks and they have a glimpse of your recommendations and skill sets. That is nice too! But seriously…wouldn’t it be better for the hiring manager or recruiter to have a deeper insight into some of the projects that you have done and the recognition that you have received? Wouldn’t it be nice for them to see how active you are in recognizing great work of your other colleagues and project co-workers? Now they would have a more comprehensive idea of who you are and what makes you tick.

We help you build your professional brand and convey your accomplishments. That translates into greater internal development opportunities in your company, promotion, increase in pay, and it also makes you more marketable. We help you connect to high-achievers and forever manage your digital portfolio of achievements that can, at your request, exist in an open environment. JuggleStars.com is a great career management tool.

Please support Jugglestars. This is an Alpha Release. Use the application in your organization. The Jugglestars team will be adding in more features over the next few months. Give them your feedback. They are an awesome team with great ideas. Please click on www.jugglestars.com and you can open an account, go to Account Settings and setup your profile and then you are pretty much ready to go to recognize your team and your colleagues at a project level.

Founded in 2012, JuggleStars provides professionals the ability to share and recognize success and broadcast recognition at varying levels of granularity across a wide array of social platforms. We enable the professionals to manage their brand and maintain and grow their digital portfolio of achievements. Our vision is to make all of the active professionals in our network become lighthouses in the global talent marketplace.

To that end, we believe that there are four tightly intertwined components in play to make this possible.

1. Rich User Experience: It is important for us to create a rich user experience to encourage users to use our application and reward their bosses, subordinates, peers and third-party vendors – all of the folk who make the life of the professional just a little easier and better. To that end, we have adopted some of the common social networking principles, user experience and general interactivity to allow quicker adoption and integration of users into the JuggleStars community. We will continue to hone and sharpen our focus, while being more inclined toward minimalism that advances the core value proposition to the user.

2. Tools: We will provide tools integrated into the rich user experience. Being bootstrapped has afforded us very little headroom to give you all that we think you would really find helpful, but our goal is to do our best to give you the tools to be able to manage your brand better. With your support and generosity, we can certainly accelerate what we can provide to you, and we hope that we can demonstrate the power of the web together to create a meaningful and impactful solution via a set of tools that will endure and stand the test of time.

3. Fun: We are a team that wants to introduce fun in the application. We have as a team worked together to integrate HR, Gaming, Recognition, Open Platform in a manner such that we introduce a healthy spirit of competition and fun while you use our application. Trust us! We are also trying to figure out ways in which you may not have to use our application. We have left you wondering now, haven’t we? Well, stay tuned.

4. Social Good: Great people do great things. They are the lighthouses for talent. They are the anchors in an organization. They fuel positivity and engagement and al’esprit de corps. They set the standards of excellence. They are the power brokers. They are the gateways that have achieved thresholds of excellence. They are the switch hitters; You can count on them to be the last ones standing. They face adversity with a smile. And most importantly, they are humble and they do not forget that they belong to a much larger community and they want to give back …if not for themselves, for the future generations. They are the lighthouses that look beyond the ocean and we are committed to provide tools to help them advance their aspirational and ideal motives that make a difference. We are with you all the way.

When I was a kid, I read tons of superhero comic books. I fantasized about superpowers, but the storylines about heroes with massive Achilles’ heels really held my attention the most. They saved the world but had screwed up personal lives, made lots of mistakes, and often acted like complete assholes. In retrospect, l related to their flaws. And, probably not coincidentally, my favorite characters exhibited core weaknesses I had experienced: Spider-Man (immaturity), Iron Man (overconfidence/hubris), and Wolverine (rage). Ironically, it was often when the character’s weakness would comingle with the superpower that would spur them to succeed against impossible odds.

It was in this context that I was riveted reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson. Given the number of different interviews and unfettered access granted to Isaacson, it felt like an incredibly authentic account of Jobs’ life. His greatest accomplishments, mistakes, superpowers, and flaws were laid out about…

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

– Rabindranath Tagore

Among the many fundamental debates in philosophy, one of the fundamental debates has been around the concept of free will. The debates have stemmed around two arguments associated with free will.

1) Since future actions are governed by the circumstances of the present and the past, human beings future actions are predetermined on account of the learnings from the past. Hence, the actions that happen are not truly a consequent of free will.

2) The counter-argument is that future actions may not necessarily be determined and governed by the legacy of the present and the past, and hence leaves headroom for the individual to exercise free will.

Now one may wonder what determinism or lack of it has anything to do with the current state of things in an organizational context. How is this relevant? Why are the abstract notions of determinism and free will important enough to be considered in the context of organizational evolution? How does the meaning lend itself to structured institutions like business organizations, if you will, whose sole purpose is to create products and services to meet the market demand.

So we will throw a factual wrinkle in this line of thought. We will introduce now an element of chance. How does chance change the entire dialectic? Simply because chance is an unforeseen and random event that may not be pre-determined; in fact, a chance event may not have a causal trigger. And chance or luck could be meaningful enough to untether an organization and its folks to explore alternative paths. It is how the organization and the people are aligned to take advantage of that random nondeterministic future that could make a huge difference to the long term fate of the organization.

The principle of inductive logic states that what is true for n and n+1 would be true for n+2. The inductive logic creates predictability and hence organizations create pathways to exploit the logical extension of inductive logic. It is the most logical apparatus that exists to advance groups in a stable but robust manner to address the multitude of challenges that that they have to grapple with. After all, the market is governed by animal spirits! But let us think through this very carefully. All competition or collaboration that occurs among groups to address the market demands result in homogenous behavior with general homogeneous outcomes. Simply put, products and services become commoditized. Their variance is not unique and distinctive. However, they could be just be distinctive enough to eke out enough profits in the margins before being absorbed into a bigger whole. At that point, identity is effaced over time. Organizations gravitate to a singularity. Unique value propositions wane over time.

So let us circle back to chance. Chance is our hope to create divergence. Chance is the factoid that cancels out the inductive vector of industrial organization. Chance does not exist … it is not a “waiting for Godot” metaphor around the corner. If it always did, it would have been imputed by the determinists in their inductive world and we would end up with a dystopian homogenous future. Chance happens. And sometimes it has a very short half-life. And if the organization and people are aligned and their mindset is adapted toward embracing and exploiting that fleeting factoid of chance, the consequences could be huge. New models would emerge, new divergent paths would be traduced and society and markets would burst into a garden of colorful ideas in virtual oasis of new markets.

So now to tie this all to free will and to the unbearable lightness of being! It is the existence of chance that creates the opportunity to exercise free will on the part of an individual, but it is the organizations responsibility to allow the individual to unharness themselves from organization inertia. Thus, organizations have to perpetuate an environment wherein employees are afforded some headroom to break away. And I don’t mean break away as in people leaving the organization to do their own gigs; I mean breakaway in thought and action within the boundaries of the organization to be open to element of chance and exploit it. Great organizations do not just encourage the lightness of being … unharnessing the talent but rather – the great organizations are the ones that make the lightness of being unbearable. These individuals are left with nothing but an awareness and openness to chance to create incredible values … far more incredible and awe inspiring and momentous than a more serene state of general business as usual affairs.

IN THE end, Microsoft fooled everyone. The replacement for its widely disparaged Windows 8 operating system turned out to be not Windows 9, as expected, but Windows 10. No explanation, other than marketing waffle, was given as to why the company should skip a release number.

IF YOU want something done, the saying goes, give it to a busy person. It is an odd way to guarantee hitting deadlines. But a paper recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests it may, in fact, be true—as long as the busy person conceptualises the deadline in the right way.

EVER since the “paperless office” was first mooted in a Business Week article back in 1975, its estimated time of arrival has always been ten years away. And so it remains. The amount of paper used in homes and offices has declined slightly over the past decade.

WHEN the autonomous cars in Isaac Asimov's 1953 short story “Sally” encourage a robotic bus to dole out some rough justice to an unscrupulous businessman, the reader is to believe that the bus has contravened Asimov's first law of robotics, which states that “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human bein...